Believe it or not, I've seen way too many examples of code that does just that at this place. I did check, and it is a property, but it only uses the auto getters and setters. For a moment, I thought that the getter was going to do some more coalescing into null or something.

I used to work for a small aerospace company. My job was to write code for microcontrollers that were used in various instruments on aircraft, and then take that code through the FAA approval process. We spent months and a bucket full of money prepping everything for the FAA review. The FAA representatives were only intent on reviewing our PROCESS, not our code or verification results. The entire time we spent with their team, the most often asked question was about how we followed their guidelines, never once about whether our code actually worked or not.